Thursday, December 27, 2012

The Lost History of Providers' Abortion Rights

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Abortion law is made in
clinics, as I suggested in a recent post. At the same time, abortion laws have
dramatically changed how clinics do business. As Johanna Schoen studies in a
forthcoming book Abortion After
Legalization, 1970-2000 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming 2013), law
has remade abortion practice. Since at least the 1990s, the vast majority of
abortions take place in independent clinics, allowing many physicians and
hospitals to distance themselves from the abortion struggle. At the same time,
in the 1970s, providers’ place in abortion politics changed. In the lead-up to Roe, physicians played a visible role in
the movement to legalize abortion. For organizations like NARAL, the involvement
of physicians like Ed Keemer or Milan Vuitch made legal abortion appear to be
more mainstream and respectable. In the decade after Roe, by contrast, the abortion-rights movement highlighted the
importance of women to the cause and the value of the cause to women. NARAL
Executive Director Karen Mulhauser highlighted her own experiences with rape in
explaining the importance of access to abortion. Other movement members invoked
the death of Rosie Jimenez, a woman who could not afford a legal abortion and
who died after a botched illegal procedure.

As providers became less
central to movement rhetoric, abortion opponents created powerful narratives
about the nature of abortion and abortion providers. Organizations like the
National Right to Life Committee argued that providers misinformed women and
exploited them for money. In well-publicized slide shows, abortion opponents
brought into the open a particular, morally charged, and violent image of
abortion.

In the 1970s, the
providers’ wing of the abortion movement had just started to mobilize, and
after 1976, the mainstream movement generally presented legal abortion as
something to be prevented. Providers, in this account, facilitated a necessary
evil. The movement offered no direct answer to claims about what the abortion
procedure involved or about how providers behaved.

The providers movement
organized gradually, with the formation of the National Abortion Federation in
the late 1970s and the founding of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers
in the 1990s. These organizations at times offered a more nuanced narrative
about the abortion experience. Highlighting prayers and burial ceremonies
preferred by some patients, providers emphasized that some women grieved the
loss of a fetus while having no regret about an abortion decision. Citing the
stories of actual patients, providers called for a change in the
abortion-rights movement’s argumentative strategy, urging activists to
acknowledge that abortion involved killing while maintaining that society
should trust the moral agency of women. The advocacy of these organizations has
at times pointed to mostly unexplored new directions in the law and policy of
abortion rights.